Agency business · For agencies
Managing an Umrah group: documents, visas and rooming
An Umrah group is won on WhatsApp and kept or lost in the paperwork. This is a practical timeline for travel agencies: what to collect from every pilgrim, when, how to arrange rooms, and the lists to send before the flight.
Labbyk editorial team 5 min read
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Selling the package is the part everyone talks about. The weeks between the booking and the flight are where agencies earn their name: every passport valid, every visa issued, every family in the right room, every rupee collected. Done well, nobody notices. Done badly, it shows up at the airport counter or the hotel desk in Makkah, in front of the whole group.
A timeline for every departure
Work backwards from the departure date. The weeks below are a sensible plan for a group of 20 to 50 pilgrims; move them earlier in Ramadan and the winter holidays, when visas, flights and hotels are busiest.
At the booking
Check the passport
Ask for the passport photo page the day they book, and check the expiry date against the return date straight away.
8 weeks before
Close the list
Confirm who is travelling, the families and the room types they paid for. Chase the missing names on bookings made for “4 people”.
6 weeks before
Collect the documents
Passport pages, photos and vaccination certificates for everyone, in the format your Saudi Umrah company asks for.
4–5 weeks before
Send the visas
Send the visa sheet and documents to your Saudi partner, and track each pilgrim’s visa until it is issued.
2–3 weeks before
Tickets and rooms
Issue tickets against the names as printed in the passport, then send each hotel its rooming list.
The last week
Money and briefing
Collect the balances, hand out the itinerary and contact sheet, and brief the group on Ihram, the Miqat and the airport.
Documents to collect from every pilgrim
Catch expired passports early
Saudi Arabia has asked for passports valid for at least six months — check the current rule with your partner. The trap is timing: a passport that is fine when the family books in September can be too close to expiry for a February departure. Check every passport against its own departure date, not today’s date, and do it at the booking, when there is still time to renew.
Returning pilgrims are the easiest to miss. Their passport is on file from last year, so nobody looks again. Keep the expiry date with every passport you hold, and when someone renews, keep the old passport in their history and make the new one current.
Families and mahram
Most Umrah bookings are families, and most of the questions on the trip are about families: who shares a room, who sits together, who is a woman’s mahram. Record the relation of everyone in the family to its head when they book — husband, wife, son, daughter, mother — and who travels as each woman’s mahram where the rules or the family want one. It saves a round of phone calls when you fill the visa sheet, and it is the starting point for the rooming list.
Visas: what your agency does
Indian agencies usually apply for Umrah visas through a licensed Saudi Umrah company, which registers the group and its bookings with the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah. Your part is to send complete, correct details on time, and to know where every pilgrim stands.
- Send names as printed in the passport, not as the family spells them on WhatsApp.
- Keep one sheet in the column order your partner asks for, so you never retype it.
- Track every pilgrim: not started, submitted, issued or rejected — with the visa number once it is issued.
- When a visa is rejected, tell the family the same day, ask your partner why, and follow your booking terms on refunds.
Rooming without arguments
Start from what was paid for
A family that paid for a double expects a double. Make the rooms from the room types on each booking.
Families first
Put each family in its own rooms before anyone else. Children and infants share with their parents.
Never mix strangers
Men and women from different families never share a room. Single pilgrims go into sharing rooms with others of the same gender.
Copy, then adjust
Most groups keep the same rooms in Makkah and Madinah. Copy the first hotel’s list to the second, then change what the hotel’s room types need.
Send it early
Hotels assign room numbers from your list. Send it a week or two before arrival, and again if anything changes.
Money before the flight
Most families pay an advance at booking and the rest in one or two instalments, often in cash. Write down every payment the day it arrives, give a numbered receipt for each, and set a date for the balance a few weeks before departure. A list of who still owes, sorted by departure date, turns the last week from a scramble into a few polite reminders.
The lists to send before departure
| List | Who it is for | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| Passenger manifest | The airline or your ticketing partner | Names as in the passport, passport numbers, dates of birth, nationality, gender, PNR |
| Visa sheet | Your Saudi Umrah company | Names, passport numbers and dates, place of issue, relation and mahram, photo file names |
| Rooming list | Each hotel | Room types, who is in each room, check-in and check-out dates |
| Contact sheet | Your group leader | Every pilgrim’s mobile, emergency contact and health needs |
Doing it in Excel — and the alternative
Excel works for one small group. With several departures a season it becomes five sheets that disagree: the passport number corrected in one and not another, a payment marked in the notebook but not the sheet, a room list made from last week’s names. The fix is one record per pilgrim that every list is made from. Labbyk keeps pilgrims, documents, visas, payments and rooms in one place, with a readiness board for each departure — and it can start from the Excel sheet you already have.
